ErosBlog: The Sex Blog

Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
 
 

ErosBlog posts containing "Pornocalypse"

 
November 4th, 2022 -- by Bacchus

Did Tumblr Blink And Un-Pornocalypse? TLDR: No

big news nudes return only they are non-discoverable

I’m sorry to report that recent news of “mature subject matter” returning to Tumblr is pretty much totally a scam. I mean, you can post it, but nobody can see it. Search invisibility is near total, even for logged-in Tumblr users. So you’re posting into a black hole of non-discoverability. What’s the point?

Let’s get into it. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

September: Rumors Of The Tumblr Un-Pornocalypse

In late September Tumblr issued a sort-of-sideways announcement about their intention to relax the anti-porn rules by introducing new community labels for mature content. However, the announcement was at pains to explain that the actual content policies were not changing at that time. Specifically: “We haven’t updated the official content policies yet.”

I didn’t blog about it, although I did Tweet. As far as I was concerned, it was a nothing-burger. Wake me up when you can show me the fine print about what’s allowed. I also wanted to wait and see if any new adult-content flexibility extends to search discovery both internally and externally. I’ve seen parts of this movie before…

Tumblr Speaks A Truth: Social Media Porn Is A Hard Problem

At roughly the same time as the nothingburger announcement, Tumblr’s Matt Mullenweg posted, to his eternal credit, the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media is essentially impossible in 2022. In Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022 Mullenweg said all the quiet parts out loud and with his full chest:

In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.

That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why.

He went on to list, in detail, the barriers imposed by credit card companies, app stores, age and consent verification, and the pornocalyptic reluctance of other companies to provide the necessary service stacks modern websites rely upon. Matt’s essay is a good essay. You go read. I’ll just share part of his conclusion:

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money [to cover costs].

November: “Bruh! Tumblr Allows Noods Again!”

Nah. Not really. Allow me to explain.

Yesterday was the big day. Tumblr’s new nudity-friendlier community guidelines dropped. They… aren’t completely terrible, if your expectations were as low as mine:

adult content community guidelines

Hardcore porn (“sexually explicit acts”) is still off limits, but the dreaded and mysterious “female-presenting nipple” is back on the menu, everybody!

But… what’s a “sexually explicit act”, you may well wonder? Ha! That’s not defined. Who wants to bet that “gay sexually explicit” and “straight sexually explicit” turn out to be two different things? Or, what about sex education? Demonstrating how to roll condoms onto a banana with your mouth, say? Or… wait! Breaking news from our field reporter on Twitter: sucking a dildo has already been flagged under the new rules, and the appeal apparently rejected. I guess “sextoyly explicit” is the same as “sexually explicit” now?

But wait! There’s more… and it’s worse. The above is Mullenweg’s summary of the new community guidelines. The actual text of the guidelines is rather more crabbed. Specifically, the forbidden “sexually explicit acts” are joined in the naughty booth by “content with an overt focus on genitalia.” What does “overt” mean, do you suppose? Guess! See if you get lucky! Would you have guessed that it included sucking on a sex toy?

adult content community guidelines prohibit overt focus on genitalia

So, have I got this right? Nudity is allowed, but if it shows too much pussy and cock, it’s not allowed. Or maybe — we’re guessing here — it’s not too much pussy and cock that gets you in trouble. Perhaps it’s a question of how closely the camera zooms in, or how brashly the genitals in question are displayed. “Overt focus” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, doesn’t it?

Search Invisibility And Your Tumblr Nudes

So, nope. I wasn’t too excited by the nothingburger news in September. But you want to know the real reason for my skepticism? It’s search invisibility. I wanted to see whether the newly-allowable adult content would be searchable, taggable, findable. Because if you can’t search for a thing, or link to it, it might as well not exist.

You all know this routine by now. We’ve written about search invisibility before. The way this scam works is that you can post stuff, but nobody can find it. Your tags don’t work; tag search results don’t have your stuff in it. Your keyword searches don’t work; the results don’t have your stuff. I’ve called this totalitarian in the past, because it’s creepy: people who don’t understand the game just assume your stuff doesn’t exist. “I just don’t understand why nothing comes back when I search for Jenna Jameson nude!” (See next link for answer.)

I first wrote about this happening to Google search suggestions back in 2008. In 2015 or before, Instagram started banning hashtags, sometimes silently and sometimes not. Likewise Pinterest and, yes, Tumblr, although Tumblr in those days had an easter egg pixel-hunt you could do to turn banned searches back on. In 2019, I caught Twitter putting adult stars in search invisibility; their names wouldn’t pop up in the @-name autocomplete function, and the one I tested back then still won’t. These are far from the only examples. I would hazard the proposition that search invisibility is the preferred treatment for grudgingly-allowed adult content on most social media platforms these days.

So what about Tumblr? Yeah, you know it.

To test, I set up an ErosBlog-themed outpost on the new more-lenient Tumblr. (Look for an update when my outpost Tumblr-blog gets inevitably banned, perhaps because of the general porn-hostile social media principle that “if you have an off-platform porn destination/brand they will ban you no matter what content you post.”)

So, yeah, it’s here: tumblr.com/erosblogbacchus. I started with one post, which is a link back to this recent comic/vintage/upskirt post on ErosBlog. Here’s what the Tumblr post looks like to me, logged into Tumblr:

sample post on Tumblr

Note the Community Label: Mature flag at the top, which I dutifully set per the new rules because I am such a good social media citizen, and even though this image is not even nude, it is mildly racy and shows a fringe of petticoats.

So, who will find and see that post? Presumably, logged-in Tumblr Users who have their mature content filters set properly in the non-default position, if they also know about my Tumblr blog and have chosen to follow it. That’s gonna be “zero” if nobody can see my posts to ever find out my new blog exists, though. No problem, I’ll just grab the URL and share it elsewhere, because that’s totally how well-functioning social media is supposed to work. Here, look at my post!

Again, if you’re logged into Tumblr and your settings are right, perhaps you see that. But if you’re just a random person coming in from the web (right here!) without an adult-verified settings-optimized Tumbler account, this is what you’ll see:

censored tumblr sample post

Woo, exciting! “Mature subject matter” is totally back, boyz! Still, I shouldn’t be too negative. Just click that big easy “Show Post” button, right?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sepulchral laughter echoing from the crypt underneath Tumblr headquarters. Because guess what? Cock-blocked! Yes, my “Community Label: Mature” post is not visible from the open web. Members only:

cockblocking interstitial

Tut-tut! “Ah, now, you need clearance for that.”

But wait a minute! Back up. What about all those hashtags? What about keyword searches? Surely…

do not call me shirly gif from airplane

If you’re on Tumblr, try the exercise. Type “Balloon Crash” into the “Search Tumblr” box. You will find a lot of posts, but not mine. Or search the #petticoats hashtag. You’ll get lots of petticoats, some of them pretty sexy, but you won’t find my “Mature”-flagged post. It is thoroughly invisible on this social media platform, for any reasonable definition of “social”. The “mature subject matter returns to Tumblr” storyline is at least 85% pure scam, because of search invisibility.

I had to poke at all of this, so I posted one more post. This one has an actual nude — a vintage nude — in it. Female-presenting nipple! Hashtag: “Vintage Nude”. When I typed in that tag, a little “popular tag” badge popped into view. Awesome! Then I clicked the tag. Not much there. Not my post, for sure! Half a dozen old posts, carefully chosen to avoid the dreaded female nipples. Popular tag? Sure! But only among friends. Only in the dark.

In Conclusion: Tumblr Can Suck My “Overt Focus” Dick

So yeah. That’s where we are. Maybe you can post some stuff on Tumblr today that you couldn’t post last week. But nobody can find it by accident. Nobody can find it by looking for it. Nobody can find it socially. You can’t show it to your off-platform friends. Time will tell if Google can see it, but I’m betting against, and what good would a Google Search result even do you?

Within Tumblr, if people already know you, are following you, have given Tumblr their date-of-birth info, and managed to set the right settings correctly, then sure, those people can now see your mature-subject-matter posts. That’s… not really very much. It’s not social media. At best, it’s in-your-bubble media. Fuck that. Just fuck it. I’m not impressed. Bacchus verdict: Tumblr is NOT back.

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November 30th, 2021 -- by Bacchus

Pornocalypse… In My WordPress? No, In My Browser!

Later update: Via commenters who are smarter than me, I have learned that WordPress doesn’t handle spell checking independently, relying instead on browser spell-check functionality. So my ire should have been directed at our dear old blue-nosed friends at Google.

Today I noticed that the dictionary used by the ErosBlog installation of WordPress knows how to spell the word “cunnilingus” and is perfectly happy to flag it when not spelled correctly. In order to do that, it has to “know” the correct spelling. But it refuses to suggest the correct spelling! The best it can do is to weakly suggest the word “ceilings”. I am not making this up:

wordpress refuses to help me spell cunnilingus

Almost certainly this was not a deliberate choice of the WordPress coders. I don’t have time today to research the source of the spellcheck routine and library that causes this result, but since WordPress is open source, it’s likely to involve logic that was coded elsewhere. This is hardly new behavior in a software product; Violet Blue caught Microsoft doing it with Word’s spellcheck way back in 2007. Nor is this the first time ErosBlog has covered search invisibility, search suggestion censorship, and arbitrary sexy-keyword “blue lists” that have been widely shared for censorship purposes in the tech industry. My guess is that WordPress is just one of the many software products that lazily or unthinkingly incorporates a library built around one of those ancient and stale blue lists.

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November 2nd, 2021 -- by Bacchus

Pornocalypse Comes For Your Roku

I’ve been aware since at least 2014 that there were shadow porn channels on the Roku. These porn channels are usually associated with major-brand pay pornsites, they don’t show up in the Roku channel list, but they’ve long been available nonetheless. Well, that’s all over now. The pornocalypse comes for us all.

XBiz reports:

roku pornocalypse headline

LOS ANGELES — Roku announced a change of policy concerning private channels last week at its annual developer conference that will result in an effective ban of porn channels by March 1, 2022.

Companies affected by the ban include Pornhub, AdultEmpire, AEBN, Wicked, Adult Time and Naughty America.

All of these companies’ Roku channels are expected to disappear on March 1, 2022.

Roku has been the target of a well-funded campaign by religiously motivated anti-porn crusading group NCOSE (formerly known as Morality in Media).

Morality in Media — our ancient enemy — strikes again!

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July 25th, 2021 -- by Bacchus

Pornocalypse Ho!

The #Pornocalypse comes for us all — even mild-mannered gardeners!

nude woman gardening with a hoe

No lesser source than the Associated Press reported out this sad tale of a New York state gardening group that was put at risk of deletion by too many automatic robot-moderation flags for the word “hoe”, which Facebook apparently thinks means the same thing as “ho”.

Moderating a Facebook gardening group in western New York is not without challenges. There are complaints of wooly bugs, inclement weather and the novice members who insist on using dish detergent on their plants.

And then there’s the word “hoe.”

Facebook’s algorithms sometimes flag this particular word as “violating community standards,” apparently referring to a different word, one without an “e” at the end that is nonetheless often misspelled as the garden tool.

Normally, Facebook’s automated systems will flag posts with offending material and delete them. But if a group’s members — or worse, administrators — violate the rules too many times, the entire group can get shut down.

Elizabeth Licata, one of the group’s moderators, was worried about this.

When a group member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post asking for “your most loved & indispensable weeding tool,” Facebook sent a notification that said “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying.”

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?” she said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”

Licata said she never heard from a person and Facebook, and found navigating the social network’s system of surveys and ways to try to set the record straight was futile.

Contacted by The Associated Press, a Facebook representative said in an email this week that the company found the group and corrected the mistaken enforcements. It also put an extra check in place, meaning that someone — an actual person — will check offending posts before the group is considered for deletion.

“We have plans to build out better customer support for our products and to provide the public with even more information about our policies and how we enforce them,” Facebook said in a statement in response to Licata’s complaints.

Note, however, that Facebook did not promise a better way to get in touch than to have an Associated Press reporter make phone calls.

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March 17th, 2021 -- by Bacchus

The Day The Pornocalypse Came For Sex Stories

On December 21, 2020, the popular adult user-upload site xHamster had 219,000 sex stories in its database:

219k sex stories at xHamster

Five days later, all those stories were gone. The URL had went 404 Page Not Found. (With a cute hamster, naturally.)

sex stories pornocalypse 404

Generic 404 text says “Sorry, this feature is technically unavailable due to technical reasons.” But that’s boilerplate. Three and a half months later, the sex stories are still gone. Sorry, people, they ain’t coming back.

Was this truly a #pornocalypse situation? xHamster isn’t talking, but signs point to yes. The biggest (and presumably most profitable) part of xHamster’s offering is its tubesite-style video content, which they monetize, presumably, in all the usual tube ways. In December of 2020, other large tubesites were targeted in a coordinated media campaign that used questionable content on their sites to successfully interrupt their credit card billing access via Visa and Mastercard. My guess is that xHamster saw that attack go down, did a quick internal review of vulnerabilities, and removed the entire erotic stories section out of fear that unpleasant content in there would open them up to similar attacks.

Story sites, as all who frequent them know, accumulate some really bizarre stories when not moderated. I don’t use the word “perversion” lightly, but I feel safe in saying you will get a comprehensive tour of human perversion when exploring any really big story site. The notorious and long-ago arrest of Jake Baker for posting snuff stories to alt.sex.stories notwithstanding, sex story archives have frequently been an “anything goes” medium for over-the-top erotic expression. Blood-on-the-walls splatter-gore, cannibalism, piss and poop and vomit, incest between people of all ages, and other squicky stuff that’s too odd to describe in a few short words: it’s all in there.

Now, I never frequented xHamster’s offering, and thus I can’t say whether or how well they moderated their stories. Maybe they didn’t have any of the wildly perverted stuff. Odds are, though, whatever they did have panicked them. They saw other tubes under attack, and it dawned on them how readily their most unpleasant story content could be weaponized against their billing. Since the stories likely weren’t much of a profit center… Boom! The pornocalypse came, real sudden-like.

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January 24th, 2021 -- by Bacchus

More Twitter Pornocalypse Incoming

Morality In Media fucks Twitter

Twitter has not been an adult-friendly platform since at least 2019, when it added porn-hostile terms of service (TOS) that are so far mostly unenforced. But now comes word that our old friends at Morality In Media (recently rebranded under the anodyne acronym NCOSE, for National Center on Sexual Exploitation) have ginned up a lawsuit starring conveniently anonymous parties and an incidence of uploaded “child sexual material” they claim (plausibly enough) Twitter flailed at moderating. The idea is to do to Twitter what they did to Backpage, forcing a blanket Twitter ban on all sexual expression:

XBIZ News Editor Gustavo Turner told the Daily Dot that NCOSE believes the “majority of depictions of lawful sexual activity or commercial sex fall under ‘human trafficking.'” The civil action case is an extension of NCOSE’s goal: “the eradication of all free sexual expression” from “public discourse.”

“The Twitter lawsuit NCOSE is sponsoring has two aims: to test the exception to Section 230 that FOSTA created for matters supposedly dealing with what they call ‘human trafficking,’ and to pressure Twitter into preemptively [adopting] a corporate censorship stance regarding all sexual material,” Turner said. “The rationale behind NCOSE’s tactic is that if a platform, because of the sheer volume of third-party content uploaded, cannot verify the ‘consenting’ and/or the ‘adult’ parts of sexual content, it should preemptively ban all of it.”

The quote is from Anti-porn Organization Takes Aim at Twitter for NSFW Ban, Sex Workers Warn, which article in turn relies heavily on reporting from XBIZ: Religiously Inspired Group NCOSE Files FOSTA Lawsuit Against Twitter.

I don’t have a lot of analysis to add to those excellent articles. However, my pessimist take is that because of underlying #Pornocalypse inclinations already displayed by Twitter, this lawsuit (and others that will surely follow if this one gets any traction) won’t prompt Twitter to upgrade and humanize its account moderation team and algorithms. (Bad moderating is the only actual wrongdoing of which Twitter stands accused in this case.) Instead, it will give Twitter “cover” with the punditry for doing what its porn-squeamish investors (there are always squeamish investors) already want: some fully-automated over-broad machine censorship that drives porn broadly off the platform, a la Tumblr. And that will be the end of adult expression on any major/corporate social media platform.

My advice to all you “horny on main” Twitter users: Prepare for the pornocalypse. Keep doing your adult marketing while you can, but remember Bacchus’s First Rule, and build yourself a backup-plan website too, if you don’t already have one. And consider making a no-adult-content alt Twitter account for all your news and politics and other non-porn activity that’s important to you. You’ll be glad of it when the porn-moderating weather gets heavy on the platform.

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October 13th, 2020 -- by Bacchus

Pornocalypse Comes For Your Very Bones

so many boners, so little time

According to Twitter, yesterday:

there is an online vertebrate palaeontology conference going on right now, and the automatic censor is blocking anyone from using the word “bone”

There’s no word on which bone-headed virtual conference software tool was responsible for this enormous boner. But another participant reported:

It’s also censoring “Hell,” so no one can mention the Hell Creek Formation. They’re now referring to it as the “Heck Creek Formation.”

This sort of stupid nonsense is what happens when you build nanny filters into your core tools. Somebody needs to tell tech companies to cut it the hell out!

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